Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to synchronizing playback of digital media content on a plurality of digital devices.
Description of Related Art
Digital devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and laptops enable users to play digital media content stored on the device or accessed via a network. In a group setting, different users may want to concurrently play the same media content on their respective devices in a synchronized fashion. However, even if users attempt to start playback on two or more digital devices at the exact same time, the playback of the media content will generally not actually start synchronously or remain synchronized throughout playback. Various factors may contribute to the loss of synchronization of the media content being played on the different devices including, for example, differences in timing of when the respective devices receive a playback start command, differences in the time for each respective device to handle the command, differences in network latency (particularly when the devices are on different networks), differences in decoding times, and differences in buffering times. These and other differences cause undesirable delays between playback of the digital content on each device which results in an undesirable user experience.